Chapter 6
ANDY
The coffee maker finishes its third cycle while I'm drafting language for the warrant affidavit at the kitchen table.
The first pot went cold before I remembered to pour from it.
The second lasted longer. This one I've been drinking on autopilot, and somewhere past the third cup I stopped tasting it.
Renata is still asleep in the guest room.
I know this because the house is quiet in the particular way it gets when someone else is breathing in it, a subtle displacement of air and silence that my space hasn't held in years.
The door at the end of the hall hasn't opened since she closed it last night, and the only sound from that direction has been the creak of the mattress when she shifted in the early hours before dawn.
The affidavit is coming together. Susan Landry's homicide gives me probable cause to search the Blanchard residence for connections between the two victims. They were both Dominion members, both killed by a single gunshot in a parking garage, professionally executed, with no witnesses.
The Blanchard home is a logical investigative step in establishing a pattern.
If there happens to be a folder in the credenza behind his desk, labeled with a date, containing photographs and blackmail correspondence, the discovery will read as diligence.
The legal fiction is clean. The reality behind it is a felony confession from a former burglar who broke into the house, memorized the evidence, and told me exactly where to find it while sitting on my couch in the dark.
Susan Landry is my case. The connection to Blanchard is what I'm building below the official one, the angle Hebert shut down when there was no body and no proof.
Now there's a body. It might not be Blanchard's, but with Landry's body I can start tracking down their killer.
The warrant threads the needle between the case I'm authorized to work and the one I'm not, and if my captain looks closely enough to see how the Blanchard search grew out of the Landry investigation, I'll need answers I don't currently have.
I save the draft and close the laptop. The kitchen window catches the early light, and a mockingbird has been running through its repertoire on the live oak in my yard for the past hour, cycling through borrowed songs like it can't decide which voice is actually its own.
The floorboard in the hallway groans. I hear her bare feet on the hardwood before she reaches the kitchen doorway, and when she appears she's wearing my NOPD academy shirt and nothing else visible below the hem.
Her hair is loose around her shoulders, creased from sleep, and her eyes carry the smudged look of someone who got less of it than she needed.
She finds the coffee maker without asking, pulls a mug from the cabinet like she's already mapped the kitchen. The ease of the movement reminds me what she is, someone who catalogs rooms on instinct, who could navigate my house blind because she already took inventory in the dark.
"Morning," I say.
"Is it?" She pours, drinks, and leans against the counter with one ankle crossed over the other. The academy shirt rides up on one thigh when she shifts her weight. She catches me noticing and doesn't adjust the fabric.
"We need to go through the Blanchard walk-through. Entry point, sequence, everything you touched."
"Before breakfast? You really know how to treat a girl, Detective."
"I can make eggs."
Her nose wrinkles. "Toast will work."
"Bread's on the counter. Butter's in the fridge." I slide the laptop aside and pull out my notebook. "Start with how you got to the house."
The walk-through takes the better part of an hour.
Renata recounts the Blanchard break-in with a specificity that would make a crime scene tech jealous.
She walks me through the back gate, the yard, the door she picked, the alarm she didn't need to bypass because the wife had disarmed it when she left.
She describes the ground floor she swept for occupancy, then the second-floor study where the desk sat squared and organized with pens in a leather cup and a brass letter opener placed parallel to the blotter edge.
She lays out the credenza, the folder position, the photographs, the blackmail emails with their escalating demands and disposable sender addresses, and Lawrence's margin note in his careful handwriting. She describes putting everything back, matching positions, wiping her touch pattern clean.
Every detail lands with photographic clarity, and I recognize the recall for what it is: a burglar's discipline, the kind of spatial memory that comes from years of entering spaces where mistakes cost freedom.
When she finishes, she sets her coffee down and meets my eyes with a directness that has nothing casual in it.
"So now you have everything I know," she says.
"The blackmail, the photographs, the connection to the old surveillance footage, the two members still at risk.
You have their names, their habits, their schedules.
" She lets the weight of it sit between us.
"So what happens now? Because you can work that club as a member all you want, but you're only there a few nights a week.
I'm there every shift. I know who orders what, who's been coming in less, who changed their routine, who looks over their shoulder more than they used to.
You don't get that from a barstool, Detective. You get that from behind the bar."
"You're a witness in a homicide investigation." I keep my voice level. "You share what you know because two people are dead and two more are at risk. That's cooperation, not negotiation."
"Cooperation." She repeats the word like it tastes bad. "That's a nice way of saying you take what I give you and I get nothing back. No information, no updates, no say in how this plays out. Just hand it over and trust the system that already failed once when those patrol officers wrote me off."
She's right, and the fact that she's right makes this worse.
"You're a civilian. I don't put civilians in active homicide investigations."
"You planning to lock me up?" The chin lifts. The hazel eyes go sharp. She folds her arms across the academy shirt and the posture is pure defiance, every line of her body daring me to try.
"If that's what it takes."
The words come out harder than I intend, and the silence that follows has a density that tells me she heard exactly what I meant.
Her breath catches by a fraction, a reaction she can't quite suppress, and the awareness that I just made a threat sound like a promise settles into my bones alongside the knowledge that I'd do it.
I would lock this woman in my guest room for the duration of the investigation if it meant keeping her alive and out of a parking garage with a bullet waiting.
"Here's what happens," I say, before the silence can become something neither of us is ready for.
"You stay here. You share what you know.
You work your shifts at Dominion because canceling them changes your routine and signals the wrong things to the wrong people.
You do not investigate on your own. You do not break into anything.
You do not slip security. When you're at the club, I'm there.
When you're here, Rapier Strategic has overwatch.
In exchange, I keep you informed on the case and I don't arrest you for the Blanchard B membership in a club I don't want NOPD to know about at the center of a case I'm running; a witness sleeping in my guest room; an informant with a criminal history I'm choosing not to report.
If Hebert traces the warrant back to its real source, the reprimand will be the least of my concerns.
Internal Affairs would have material for a career-ending investigation, and Fontenot would shake his head and say he told me so.
I'm doing it anyway. Susan Landry is dead.
Lawrence Blanchard is dead. Two more names are sitting in my notebook, and the man who wrote that warrant affidavit with probable cause that looks clean on paper is the same man who got the information from a burglar he's protecting because his badge couldn't do the job on its own.
The contradiction should bother me more than it does. What bothers me instead is her bare thigh below the hem of my shirt, and the fact that she caught me looking, and how deliberately she chose not to fix it.
We file the warrant before noon. The execution will have to wait for a judge's signature and coordination with the forensic unit, which buys me time to build the Landry case around it.
I drive Renata to her apartment and wait just inside the doorway while she packs, moving through the space and taking what matters with the speed of someone who's done it before.
She's back at my side with a duffel and a garment bag in a matter of minutes.